In the digital age, speed is everything and no-one wants to be left behind. Being slow to react is the first and, most likely, final nail in the coffin for a 21st century company. The rigidity of the traditional ‘waterfall' development approach was overhauled by the ‘agile' philosophy. And with agility things have changed; its brought into reality the idea of continuous delivery.

Move with the Times or Get Left BehindBut what is continuous delivery? Simply put, it's the ability to push any kind of change, be it new functionality, code updates, bug squashes or the like, into production environments quickly and safely. Not only this, but each release must be stable and sustainable. Continuous delivery eradicates pesky time-consuming processes and freeze periods, as it removes the need for dedicated silos of integration and testing. This is all achieved by creating code which is always in a state fit for deployment. In theory, continuous delivery enables us to release stable code to production at any given time - an approach demanded by the needs of the end user and impossible to achieve through waterfall-styled development.

Those who have adopted continuous delivery are already reaping the rewards. They're seeing how it significantly improves your time-to-market: as your changes can be published almost instantly, you're no longer restricted by a rigid release schedule. You become much faster to react, to iron out bugs and release features. Your customers are more satisfied than before, which is what we ultimately strive for.

Shipping a release has traditionally been momentous, something we want to shout about, and rightly so. Ironing out those bugs or releasing those long sought-after features is no small feat and takes a huge amount of effort from everyone involved. There's nothing worse than shipping, only for new bugs to crop up, or the software to crash. Continuous delivery allows you (in theory) to continually deploy - just not always to customers. Pushing your stable code to UAT environments or staging reduces the risk around the production release. Now, you're no longer deploying once every few months: you can be releasing every single day.

There are often barriers, inefficiencies and hidden costs in the release cycle which, historically, went unnoticed until launch. Continuous delivery highlights all these flaws, making them clear to the business and senior management members, who are in charge of making decisions. Pipelines will be much more transparent: you'll know where and when manual, human input will be required, where bottlenecks will crop up, where automation can be implemented. The pipeline now creates a clear incentive for a dynamic software delivery schedule, replacing a notion of dissatisfaction with costly, long and arduous release windows.

Flexibility is one of the main selling points of the model. Yes, there is an initial outlay in terms of infrastructure, in both software and operational architectures, but once this seed is sown, the benefits are there to be reaped. Features and fixes are now available to be pushed to specific individuals or customer subsets, ensuring the functionality works as expected. Or the features can remain dormant within the product, awaiting a future release which could be sparked by a marketing push for example. In the past, trying to devise such functionality would have been a logistical and costly nightmare. With continuous delivery, it's par for the course.

The rewards speak for themselves. Like I said, continuous delivery is simple - in theory. The difficulties arise in its implementation.

The Pains of ChangingThe main challenge you may encounter while trying to implement continuous delivery will probably be organizational. While more and more companies are working toward implementing a DevOps culture - structurally, they may not yet be ready for continuous delivery. You'll still find plenty of firms are split into seemingly countless divisions, each of which ‘owns' a particular product, feature, or codebase. Each division is going to have its own goals, targets and KPIs it must meet. Trying to bring these ‘opposing' factions together can be a logistical nightmare which could prove to be the undoing of your dreams of agility.

Therein lies the problem. For large companies, it can take months, if not years, to move complex applications to continuous delivery. It requires a complete mind-set overhaul to adapt to this new process. New behaviors and practices must be learned, architecture will probably need revisiting as will software development processes. Top-down changes must be implemented in order to promote a culture of collaboration.

In all honesty, continuous delivery can seem a tough sell when presenting the concept to senior management for a number of reasons. Firstly, they have their own day-to-day tasks to see to, which depending on seniority levels, are going to take up much of their time. They may not be as tech-minded as yourself and may not be able to immediately see the benefits of implementation. They also have their own views, priorities and goals, which may vary from yours.

The barriers to employing continuous delivery may seem insurmountable at times but, as we've seen, the benefits of the approach speak for themselves. That's how you'll sell the approach to senior stakeholders.

Automation is the keyContinuous delivery has revolutionized the way we develop and release software, but without automation, arguably it wouldn't be possible at all. Automating the entire pipeline, from code submission, through testing and environmental deployments is crucial to being able to obtain true continuous delivery.

The entire philosophy is built around flexibility, around agility; code changes and releases could be occurring at any time. Without the right automation processes in place, saving manual testing, deployment and releases, we'd be back at square one: the cumbersome waterfall approach. Manually overseeing each of these processes would completely defeat the entire goal of continuous delivery. But, like I said, times really have (a) changed.

Automic, a leader in business automation, helps enterprises drive competitive advantage by automating their IT factory - from on-premise to the Cloud, Big Data and the Internet of Things.

With offices across North America, Europe and Asia-Pacific, Automic powers over 2,600 customers including Bosch, PSA, BT, Carphone Warehouse, Deutsche Post, Societe Generale, TUI and Swisscom. The company is privately held by EQT. More information can be found at www.automic.com.

SYS-CON Events announced today that Keisoku Research Consultant Co. will exhibit at the Japan External Trade Organization (JETRO) Pavilion at SYS-CON's 21st International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on Oct 31 – Nov 2, 2017, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Keisoku Research Consultant, Co. offers research and consulting in a wide range of civil engineering-related fields from information construction to preservation of cultural properties. For more information, vi...

SYS-CON Events announced today that Interface Corporation will exhibit at the Japan External Trade Organization (JETRO) Pavilion at SYS-CON's 21st International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on Oct 31 – Nov 2, 2017, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Interface Corporation is a company developing, manufacturing and marketing high quality and wide variety of industrial computers and interface modules such as PCIs and PCI express. For more information, visit http://www.i...

SYS-CON Events announced today that MIRAI Inc. will exhibit at the Japan External Trade Organization (JETRO) Pavilion at SYS-CON's 21st International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on Oct 31 – Nov 2, 2017, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
MIRAI Inc. are IT consultants from the public sector whose mission is to solve social issues by technology and innovation and to create a meaningful future for people.

SYS-CON Events announced today that Fusic will exhibit at the Japan External Trade Organization (JETRO) Pavilion at SYS-CON's 21st International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on Oct 31 – Nov 2, 2017, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Fusic Co. provides mocks as virtual IoT devices. You can customize mocks, and get any amount of data at any time in your test. For more information, visit https://fusic.co.jp/english/.

Smart cities have the potential to change our lives at so many levels for citizens: less pollution, reduced parking obstacles, better health, education and more energy savings. Real-time data streaming and the Internet of Things (IoT) possess the power to turn this vision into a reality. However, most organizations today are building their data infrastructure to focus solely on addressing immediate business needs vs. a platform capable of quickly adapting emerging technologies to address future ...

SYS-CON Events announced today that Taica will exhibit at the Japan External Trade Organization (JETRO) Pavilion at SYS-CON's 21st International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on Oct 31 – Nov 2, 2017, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Taica manufacturers Alpha-GEL brand silicone components and materials, which maintain outstanding performance over a wide temperature range -40C to +200C. For more information, visit http://www.taica.co.jp/english/.

In his session at @ThingsExpo, Greg Gorman is the Director, IoT Developer Ecosystem, Watson IoT, will provide a short tutorial on Node-RED, a Node.js-based programming tool for wiring together hardware devices, APIs and online services in new and interesting ways. It provides a browser-based editor that makes it easy to wire together flows using a wide range of nodes in the palette that can be deployed to its runtime in a single-click.
There is a large library of contributed nodes that help so...

SYS-CON Events announced today that Daiya Industry will exhibit at the Japan External Trade Organization (JETRO) Pavilion at SYS-CON's 21st International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on Oct 31 – Nov 2, 2017, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Daiya Industry specializes in orthotic support systems and assistive devices with pneumatic artificial muscles in order to contribute to an extended healthy life expectancy.
For more information, please visit https://www.daiyak...

What is the best strategy for selecting the right offshore company for your business?
In his session at 21st Cloud Expo, Alan Winters, U.S. Head of Business Development at MobiDev, will discuss the things to look for - positive and negative - in evaluating your options. He will also discuss how to maximize productivity with your offshore developers.
Before you start your search, clearly understand your business needs and how that impacts software choices.

SYS-CON Events announced today that SIGMA Corporation will exhibit at the Japan External Trade Organization (JETRO) Pavilion at SYS-CON's 21st International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on Oct 31 – Nov 2, 2017, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
uLaser flow inspection device from the Japanese top share to Global Standard! Then, make the best use of data to flip to next page. For more information, visit http://www.sigma-k.co.jp/en/.

SYS-CON Events announced today that Yuasa System will exhibit at the Japan External Trade Organization (JETRO) Pavilion at SYS-CON's 21st International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on Oct 31 – Nov 2, 2017, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Yuasa System is introducing a multi-purpose endurance testing system for flexible displays, OLED devices, flexible substrates, flat cables, and films in smartphones, wearables, automobiles, and healthcare.

SYS-CON Events announced today that B2Cloud will exhibit at SYS-CON's 21st International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on Oct 31 – Nov 2, 2017, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
B2Cloud specializes in IoT devices for preventive and predictive maintenance in any kind of equipment retrieving data like Energy consumption, working time, temperature, humidity, pressure, etc.

SYS-CON Events announced today that NetApp has been named “Bronze Sponsor” of SYS-CON's 21st International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on Oct 31 – Nov 2, 2017, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
NetApp is the data authority for hybrid cloud. NetApp provides a full range of hybrid cloud data services that simplify management of applications and data across cloud and on-premises environments to accelerate digital transformation. Together with their partners, NetApp em...

SYS-CON Events announced today that Ryobi Systems will exhibit at the Japan External Trade Organization (JETRO) Pavilion at SYS-CON's 21st International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on Oct 31 – Nov 2, 2017, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Ryobi Systems Co., Ltd., as an information service company, specialized in business support for local governments and medical industry. We are challenging to achive the precision farming with AI. For more information, visit http:...

SYS-CON Events announced today that mruby Forum will exhibit at the Japan External Trade Organization (JETRO) Pavilion at SYS-CON's 21st International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on Oct 31 – Nov 2, 2017, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
mruby is the lightweight implementation of the Ruby language. We introduce mruby and the mruby IoT framework that enhances development productivity. For more information, visit http://forum.mruby.org/.

SYS-CON Events announced today that Enroute Lab will exhibit at the Japan External Trade Organization (JETRO) Pavilion at SYS-CON's 21st International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on Oct 31 – Nov 2, 2017, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Enroute Lab is an industrial design, research and development company of unmanned robotic vehicle system. For more information, please visit http://elab.co.jp/.

Real IoT production deployments running at scale are collecting sensor data from hundreds / thousands / millions of devices. The goal is to take business-critical actions on the real-time data and find insights from stored datasets.
In his session at @ThingsExpo, John Walicki, Watson IoT Developer Advocate at IBM Cloud, will provide a fast-paced developer journey that follows the IoT sensor data from generation, to edge gateway, to edge analytics, to encryption, to the IBM Bluemix cloud, to Wa...

Many companies start their journey to the cloud in the DevOps environment, where software engineers want self-service access to the custom tools and frameworks they need. Machine learning technology can help IT departments keep up with these demands.
In his session at 21st Cloud Expo, Ajay Gulati, Co-Founder, CTO and Board Member at ZeroStack, will discuss the use of machine learning for automating provisioning of DevOps resources, taking the burden off IT teams.

DevSecOps – a trend around transformation in process, people and technology – is about breaking down silos and waste along the software development lifecycle and using agile methodologies, automation and insights to help get apps to market faster. This leads to higher quality apps, greater trust in organizations, less organizational friction, and ultimately a five-star customer experience.
These apps are the new competitive currency in this digital economy and they’re powered by data. Without ...

Containers are the future of web development, in large part thanks to Docker’s explosive growth. According to DataDog, 15 percent of hosts run Docker, which is significantly up from the 6 percent of hosts running it at this point in 2015. LinkedIn has also seen a 160 percent increase in profile references to Docker in just the past year alone, indicating Docker has become a much bigger priority for IT professionals looking for work. With this technology primed to continue its exponential growth ...

Is advanced scheduling in Kubernetes achievable?
Yes, however, how do you properly accommodate every real-life scenario that a Kubernetes user might encounter?
How do you leverage advanced scheduling techniques to shape and describe each scenario in easy-to-use rules and configurations?
In his session at @DevOpsSummit at 21st Cloud Expo, Oleg Chunikhin, CTO at Kublr, will answer these questions and demonstrate techniques for implementing advanced scheduling. For example, using spot instances ...

The nature of the technology business is forward-thinking. It focuses on the future and what’s coming next. Innovations and creativity in our world of software development strive to improve the status quo and increase customer satisfaction through speed and increased connectivity.
Yet, while it's exciting to see enterprises embrace new ways of thinking and advance their processes with cutting edge technology, it rarely happens rapidly or even simultaneously across all industries.

With the modern notion of digital transformation, enterprises are chipping away at the fundamental organizational and operational structures that have been with us since the nineteenth century or earlier.
One remarkable casualty: the business process. Business processes have become so ingrained in how we envision large organizations operating and the roles people play within them that relegating them to the scrap heap is almost unimaginable, and unquestionably transformative.
In the Digital ...

These days, APIs have become an integral part of the digital transformation journey for all enterprises. Every digital innovation story is connected to APIs . But have you ever pondered over to know what are the source of these APIs? Let me explain - APIs sources can be varied, internal or external, solving different purposes, but mostly categorized into the following two categories. Data lakes is a term used to represent disconnected but relevant data that are used by various business units wit...

Today most companies are adopting or evaluating container technology - Docker in particular - to speed up application deployment, drive down cost, ease management and make application delivery more flexible overall.
As with most new architectures, this dream takes significant work to become a reality. Even when you do get your application componentized enough and packaged properly, there are still challenges for DevOps teams to making the shift to continuous delivery and achieving that reducti...

‘Trend’ is a pretty common business term, but its definition tends to vary by industry. In performance monitoring, trend, or trend shift, is a key metric that is used to indicate change.
Change is inevitable. Today’s websites must frequently update and change to keep up with competition and attract new users, but such changes can have a negative impact on the user experience if not managed properly. The dynamic nature of the Internet makes it necessary to constantly monitor different metrics. O...

Agile has finally jumped the technology shark, expanding outside the software world. Enterprises are now increasingly adopting Agile practices across their organizations in order to successfully navigate the disruptive waters that threaten to drown them. In our quest for establishing change as a core competency in our organizations, this business-centric notion of Agile is an essential component of Agile Digital Transformation.
In the years since the publication of the Agile Manifesto, the conn...

Many organizations are now looking to DevOps maturity models to gauge their DevOps adoption and compare their maturity to their peers. However, as enterprise organizations rush to adopt DevOps, moving past experimentation to embrace it at scale, they are in danger of falling into the trap that they have fallen into time and time again.
Unfortunately, we've seen this movie before, and we know how it ends: badly.

There is a huge demand for responsive, real-time mobile and web experiences, but current architectural patterns do not easily accommodate applications that respond to events in real time. Common solutions using message queues or HTTP long-polling quickly lead to resiliency, scalability and development velocity challenges. In his session at 21st Cloud Expo, Ryland Degnan, a Senior Software Engineer on the Netflix Edge Platform team, will discuss how by leveraging a reactive stream-based protocol,...

Not very long ago, in my IT consulting career, I used to be responsible for the launch of mission-critical applications that help enterprises leap into the cutting edge of the digital business revolution. There were a lot of hard skills required for leading such a mission that involved getting the system architecture and software design right early, mentoring and managing the engineering resources, and tracking the progress to the satisfaction of the business analysts who put together the requir...

DevOps at Cloud Expo, taking place October 31 - November 2, 2017, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA, is co-located with 21st Cloud Expo and will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading industry players in the world.
The widespread success of cloud computing is driving the DevOps revolution in enterprise IT. Now as never before, development teams must communicate and collaborate in a dynamic, 24/7/365 environment. There is no time to w...

New competitors, disruptive technologies, and growing expectations are pushing every business to both adopt and deliver new digital services. This ‘Digital Transformation’ demands rapid delivery and continuous iteration of new competitive services via multiple channels, which in turn demands new service delivery techniques – including DevOps. In this power panel at @DevOpsSummit 20th Cloud Expo, moderated by DevOps Conference Co-Chair Andi Mann, panelists examined how DevOps helps to meet the de...

Cloud Expo, Inc. has announced today that Andi Mann and Aruna Ravichandran have been named Co-Chairs of @DevOpsSummit at Cloud Expo Silicon Valley which will take place Oct. 31-Nov. 2, 2017, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA. "DevOps is at the intersection of technology and business-optimizing tools, organizations and processes to bring measurable improvements in productivity and profitability," said Aruna Ravichandran, vice president, DevOps product and solutions marketing...

The convergence of rapid feature development, automation, continuous delivery, and the shifting makeup of modern tech stacks has pushed monitoring requirements to a potentially overwhelming scale. But while the systems you need to monitor are complex, your monitoring strategy doesn’t have to be. The scale and pace of change involved in ops today dictate a carefully crafted monitoring and incident response strategy. Keeping the strategy simple will take some of the pain out of monitoring.

SYS-CON Events announced today that DXWorldExpo has been named “Global Sponsor” of SYS-CON's 21st International Cloud Expo, which will take place on Oct 31 – Nov 2, 2017, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA. Digital Transformation is the key issue driving the global enterprise IT business. Digital Transformation is most prominent among Global 2000 enterprises and government institutions.

One of the biggest challenges with adopting a DevOps mentality is: new applications are easily adapted to cloud-native, microservice-based, or containerized architectures - they can be built for them - but old applications need complex refactoring. On the other hand, these new technologies can require relearning or adapting new, oftentimes more complex, methodologies and tools to be ready for production.
In his general session at @DevOpsSummit at 20th Cloud Expo, Chris Brown, Solutions Marketi...

Cloud computing budgets worldwide are reaching into the hundreds of billions of dollars, and no organization can survive long without some sort of cloud migration strategy. Each month brings new announcements, use cases, and success stories.